Ant-Man (2015)

★★★½ / 👍

I genuinely enjoyed my time with Ant-Man more than I did my time with Avengers: Age of Ultron. Yes, it’s product straight off the assembly line from Marvel Studios, but it’s better than it had to be, and much better than I expected it to be.

Rudd is charming. The humor is mostly engaging. The special effects are adequate if not spectacular. Evangeline Lilly shows just enough range here that I may finally be able to move on from how much I hated her (character) for six seasons on Lost.

The mix of caper comedy, science fiction, superhero action, and family drama is definitely awkward at times, a little too “Ocean’s Eleven meets Interstellar, but Marvel” for its own good. It feels like a film that needed a few more drafts to hide the seams of the jackalope stitched together by Adam McKay & Paul Rudd after Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish left the project.

The fairly deep references to the evolving lore of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are exciting to someone like me, who was preaching the “comic books are our Greek mythology” gospel long before I knew what words like “intertextuality” meant. It’s a pity that production circumstances have turned the Pym/Ant-Man legacy into a mere copy of the Stark/Iron Man story, right down to the Evil Bald Corporate Mad Scientist. Still, any suggestion that this universe’s history wasn’t entirely on hold while everyone waited for Cap to defrost and Tony Stark to “mature” is very welcome indeed.

Finally, I would watch the hell out of a reboot of The Streets of San Francisco starring Bobby Cannavale and Wood Harris. Your move, ABC/Disney.